To finalize and really make myself clear.
Racism exists indeed in that some people dislike other people because they are of a different race. This is clear.
The invention I am talking about is when media and politicians tag xenophobia - as in someone who is suspicious of another person because that person is different, or a stranger, or not part of the group, in other words: an alien - as racism.
I think that while commonly used interchangeably, the two concepts are different. One is stupid because I'm not even sure a concept such as race can be defined scientifically. The other is a natural reaction of almost all living beings I can remember. Mixing the two does not, in my opinion, wield good results. It only makes people confused because while they feel they're entitled to distrust strangers because they are strangers, they don't like to be labeled racists because they're not.
Racism is the by-product of pseudo-scientific victorian anthropology made by arrogant 19th century imperialists and can't really exist if people are really scientifically educated. Xenophobia is a natural defense reaction that can gradually be lowered by mutual demonstrations of trust and good intentions by both host and guest.
This is what I meant. I am sorry if I failed to present my arguments in a compelling way but I can't stop myself from thinking if the same thing I'm trying to expose - the taboo about facing both concepts and differentiate between them - isn't the very thing that was stopping you from actually getting to see my point in the first place.
As for the dolphins, it was indeed irrelevant and was meant as a personal attack which clearly failed to deliver. Serves me right for trusting what the tv says. I apologize.
"You're basically saying A > A since this "anyone" includes "you" too.
So.. he hates Microsoft so much he does an infinite recursion of Cantor diagonalisation every time he thinks of them?
That's a lot of hate!
No amount of AV is going to protect against a user's stupidity.
And no amount of AV is going to protect against vendor/distributor stupidity either. Here we have a program, running on a non-firewalled device, which on install, instead of being non-functional, opens up to the whole world with a default password. This is not the 1990's people! In this day and age, I expect a program to be secure by default... whatever it takes, even if it means it is non-functional at install.
I actually have a jailbroken iphone on which I installed openssh. When I logged in I immediately realized the risk I was running and changed the password. However, between the time of installing openssh on my iPhone and the moment I changed the password there was at least a period of 5 minutes in which people could have hijacked the machine. Unforgivable. This distributor should be ashamed of himself.
We all know that contributing upstream bandwidth that you're already paying for anyways is NOT the same as paying $10 for a DVD, otherwise we would be doing that.
Many times I see people keep on seeding, even if the file is in multiple small RAR files (yes, some morons still distribute gigabyte files formatted for floppies). Those RAR files are utterly useless once their content has been extracted, and take up valuable hard disk space, yet people still leave them there and the torrent program - which also consumes resources - running.
Also, given the choice, I'd rather pay $20 to a pirate than $10 to a media company, since the latter will use the money against me. It is unwise to fund your enemies.
And that an encoding and seeding job can be done by one person or a small team but lead to thousands of people getting it, so yes it is a "tiny subset" that contributes meaningful work (time and effort to encode and edit), while most 'contribute' something that requires no effort on their part.
Apparently there's enough people contributing their efforts that everything that gets released in a digital format - and many things that got released in analog ones - appear on P2P within days of their release, if not earlier, usually multiple times. The reason there's no more people ripping movies and disinfecting software is that even the current labour force is ridiculously oversized relative to the task.
Nearly everyone in P2P community contributes everything they can be reasonably expected to, and many people far in excess of that. It is your argument that is absurd, saying that people dublicating effort only 2-5 times rather than 1000 times over makes them freeloaders.
And while I think copyright laws are too strict and prosecuting for reverse-engineering is horrible, I have to rage a bit at the "evil corporations pay only a small % of sales to artists, so it's okay to copy" argument. What percentage of money from P2P downloads go to the artist? What is 1% of zero?
I haven't made any such argument. I'm against copyright simply because it is sick that our entire society and communication technology is getting twisted out of shape just to financially benefit people who make pop songs. And, as the secret ACTA negotiation process once again demonstrates, it seems impossible to have copyright that stays reasonable, I say we're better off without it.
"A car is just a big purse on wheels." -- Johanna Reynolds